Severe Weather USA

Chris AU is a storm chaser, environmental scientist, and photographer. He owns Severe Weather USA a type of news publishing service on latest activities within the storm/chase community. We have conducted an interview with Chris.

What is this Severe Weather USA and its community about?

The main aspect is the live streaming of severe weather events, the big ones are the tornadoes they drew huge numbers but it’s about any severe weather at the same time even if we do focus on storms a lot.

What do you do as a profession and what is your background? 
I am a network engineer and network security encryption analyst, I also have a background in environmental science to be exact but my day job is I.T right now.

How do you bring the community together?

The community itself is really good at organizing themselves they’re very active on the internet and are really into weather so they know when the next severe weather day is ahead of time so they’re just waiting, once those severe weather days are live we’ll start posting the content we think they’ll want to read and we know this from being fans ourselves we all started with watching live streams, we also post the daily severe weather outlooks in our group as a pinned post where our users can post things they find through the day and we’ll post to the page about urgent or time sensitive topics to avoid them being missed in the group because on live severe weather days our group can be thousands of posts even with a main pinned topic, our users will also post about weather events local to them this is something we really enjoy reading through and seeing their pictures and plan to expand to a bigger platform for them on our website

What kind of activities do you publish about?

We try to keep severe weather events within the United States and Canada, but we will post anything weather related if we think people will want to read and look at it, in a couple of weeks our website will go live and the articles we post on there will be even more in-depth that and they’ll come from our team who range from storm chasers to bloggers all interested in severe weather so the user base will get a wide range of views and opinions on the severe weather events and live streams, from what we know we’re the first to run something like this so we’re excited to push it out to the community and see what they think.

Why do you want to create a community/site for severe weather and storm chasing?

it was really about unifying the users of the storm chase live streams while our brand's role has broadened into live reporting of events and live streams our core philosophy is to unify the users and chasers of severe weather. when I first started researching severe weather and watching storm chase live streams I saw a hole in the market because once the streamer finished their stream and logged off ,the chat associated with the stream the chat went with it, so that’s where the original facebook group came from, we did very well with it, once that particular site closed earlier this year we had to make a choice our group was named after the site so I decided to rebrand and group everything under the one name we had planned to do this at some point but the closure of the site sped up our plans, so we rebranded under the severe weather USA name

Where do you normally go to chase storm?

I am based in Melbourne Australia, I storm chase pretty much anywhere we can go and get back that night even if it’s very early morning, but we favor the north and west of Melbourne and have had good results working like that, and pictures from my storm chases are available from my twitter, next year the plan is to head to the united states meet up with some friends and head out to tornado alley

Who do you run this idea as a business together?

my business partner and partner in taking over the world is Andy Hoeland a native of Arizona it’s kind of a strange match but it works for both of us, with us being on the opposite sides of the world we’re able to cover critical events without too much delay, we're very similar people so working together is a pleasure our minds work on the same wave length so business decisions come easy.